Reviewing Aniruddha Bose’s TOMAKE…. – By Dulali Nag

How does one classify a work like “TOMAKE”? A philosophical meditation on the relation between Time and Space in forming human experience? Another literary exploration of the ever-eluding idea of Love? An experiment in textual representation of the inseparability of Reality and Imagination?

I shall leave it to each individual reader of this very original novelette to work out an acceptable classification for herself. As a reviewer my job is to provide the reader with an entry into the structure of idea of the work to facilitate the reader’s appreciation of it.

On the face of it, the story is structured in the age-old tradition of narrating the development of a love-relation between a man and a woman in the form of a compilation of their love-letters to each other over a period of time. In that sense, as one letter follows another, the reader is safely led along the path of believing that here we are reading a story about two lovers who are gradually discovering each other over a period of linear Time. The reader is lulled into the security of our familiar world where we see Time as divided into the three zones of Past, Present and Future and understand the development of any relation as a journey from the Past to the Present and on to a Future.

The author shatters this comfortable structure of understanding a relation at the very end of the story. Without giving away the end, let me just say that the author here forces us to re-examine our socially familiar mode of perceiving human relations as always strung from a linear notion of Time comprising the Past, Present and Future. The author introduces here another dimension of Time – the Vertical one – that cuts through our familiar mode of understanding Life, Experience, Feelings and Relations to bring us to an uncharted territory where we are challenged to rethink the very reality of our existence.